Utc Had No Choice, Chief Says

January 22, 1992|By ROBERT WEISMAN; Courant Staff Writer

NEW YORK — When it was finally over Tuesday afternoon, Robert F. Daniell looked flat-out exhausted.

The lean and plain-spoken chairman of Hartford's giant United Technologies Corp. had just spent nearly six hours briefing securities analysts and news reporters on the company's sweeping restructuring and financial goals.

Now he was sitting back in a partitioned conference room at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, sipping from a glass of Diet Pepsi and fiddling with a strip of a label torn from the soda bottle.

Daniell, 58, said he was pleased with the way everything had gone.

"The restructuring program, at least from the comments I heard, was very, very positively received [by Wall Street analysts]," he said, noting management had been working on the plan for six months.

But it clearly had not been an easy day for UTC's chief executive, a former Sikorsky Aircraft engineer who had climbed through the ranks, first at the Stratford-based UTC helicopter division, and then at the parent company's headquarters in Hartford's Gold Building.

Tuesday had not been easy because Daniell had to announce the elimination of nearly 14,000 jobs -- with 25 to 30 percent of them likely to come from layoffs. And he had to do it at a time when the job market was bad, especially in Connecticut.

"It's awfully tough," Daniell said. "And the real tragedy today, compared with some previous reductions, is that the work environment and the number of opportunities are just so few and far between ... It's just very, very disturbing to figure out how these people are going to find employment."

Yet if UTC does not stay competitive with Fairfield-based General Electric Co. and other rivals, he said, Connecticut will have far fewer jobs.

Asked whether UTC might someday increase its Connecticut employment rolls again, Daniell said, "You can be well assured we are not reducing the square footage of our facilities to the point where, if something positive happens and there can be an uptick, that we have to put new brick and mortar in ... And if that does

occur, then obviously we'll be adding to the employment level."

Still, he said, "I can't, as a responsible CEO, at this point in time based upon what I see, do anything but take the actions we're taking."

UTC is well aware of its role as a pillar of the state economy, Daniell said.

"We are a large component of the state," Daniell observed. "We have no desire to further contribute to the economic woes of the state or the various towns. So we have been prudently conservative in our actions. There is no significant relocation of any of our core businesses out of the state of Connecticut, nor any planned." He said UTC's employment in Connecticut had declined modestly to 47,650, from 51,000 at the end of 1990. "By the time we're done, by 1995, with Pratt & Whitney [cuts] and so forth, it may be down to 41,000."

Daniell said he did not mean to minimize a reduction of 10,000 jobs.

But he said, "When you assess that, vs. the changes that have gone on in the [economy], I think it demonstrates that we have been as responsive as anyone could expect we could be within the state of Connecticut."

Daniell said UTC is restructuring for business reasons, not specifically to send a message to state government.

But he added, "If I was working for the state, I'm sure this would fortify, hopefully, what I already know. And that is that we need to do everything we can to enhance the [business] environment so that we are as competitive as we can possibly be going forward."